Twenty years ago, one of the leading post-Mao era writers, Yu Hua, found a way to voice the dark experiences of rural China in his groundbreaking novel “To Live” (活着, Huozhe in Chinese).

A year later, film director Zhang Yimou brought the gripping tale to the big screen to international critical acclaim – winning the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Foreign Language Film at the BAFTA Awards in 1995 — only to face a ban in China.

The story, which is set over a period that sweeps across the Chinese civil war in the 1940s to the tumultuous Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976, is getting another public viewing now – this time on stage under the direction of the talented avant-garde master of drama Meng Jinghui.

“Everything has been going smoothly,” Mr. Meng told the Wall Street Journal at a reception ahead of the Beijing opening. “We closely followed the original novel, which is not a social history but a personal history. “

But he adds: “So far I’ve been lucky as a director. “

The 49-year-old director of the National Theatre of China is best known for his absurdist taste and staging works like “Rhinoceros in Love,” “Soft,” and Dario Fo’s “The Accidental Death of an Anarchist.” His stellar cast this time around is led by Huang Bo, the actor who shot to fame with his comic role in the hugely popular 2006 screen farce called “Crazy Stone,” and actress Yuan Quan, who last appeared on screen in 2012’s “The Last Tycoon.”

Yu Hua’s novel, which has been translated into dozens of languages, describes the life of Xu Fugui, the profligate son from a wealthy family. While his name means “rich,” he loses all of his wealth gambling and ironically spends the rest of his life in poverty.

He is forced to become a soldier — first under the Nationalists and then for the Communists. In a twist of fate, he lives to sees the man who ended up owning his property executed by the Communists as a landlord and enemy of the people. It dawns on him that poverty sometimes has its small rewards.

From his dissolute beginnings he becomes an adoring father and grandfather only to watch his family members die one by one in a series of cruel twists of fate. He insists he just wants to live a simple life but circumstances always seem to interfere.

Courtesy of Meng Jinghui Drama Studio

Huang Bo (R) and Yuan Quan (L) in a scene from “To Live.”

Mr. Meng’s direction and the stark but imaginative staging adds to an already bleak story. In the Zhang Yimou version, Fugui ends up with a glimmer of hope as one grandson survives the string of tragedies. Mr. Meng’s stage version tacks a bit closer to the Yu Hua novel, leaving no one spared. “Zhang Yimou had a little softer touch,” said Mr. Meng.

While it may not have killed off as many characters, the film lobbed a more obvious assault on the arbitrariness of political power, taking an incendiary aim at absurdities such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. As a result, Zhang Yimou was banned from filmmaking for two years. In September 2010, when Mr. Zhang was interviewed by local news and entertainment website ifeng.com, he said: “I’m tiny when I’m in front of the system, and I feel powerless. China’s film censorship will continue to exist for many years.”

Mr. Zhang is enthusiastically embraced by authorities these days. His leading role in the artistic establishment was cemented when he was tapped to direct the lavish opening ceremonies at China’s “coming out party” — the Beijing Olympics – in 2008.

The slightly better reception for Mr. Meng’s “To Live” – the second time he has brought the play to the stage — is largely the result of the passage of time. The film was made only five years after the upheaval of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a time when political critiques, even of the Cultural Revolution, were salt in an open wound. But the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution is now so far removed from current events that much of the sting is gone.

Mr. Meng may also benefit from the the fact that no matter how riveting the performance, a stage production is less threatening than a mass market film.

“To Live” is now on a tour of nine major cities in China, and will be shown in Germany in 2014.

Mr. Meng, who strolled onto the stage in a Pink Floyd t-shirt to welcome those lucky enough to get a ticket to one sold-out performance in Beijing, had some advice for theater-goers: “I want to make my audience strongly face their difficulties and live steadfastly when they think of Fugui.”